Fault Line Read Online Free Page A

still.’
    Hex grimaced as he felt the heat of the smouldering stick near his skin. Then he felt Paulo clap him on his bare shoulder. ‘All done.’
    Hex glanced over his shoulder. The leech was on the ground, curling and wriggling. ‘That’s huge. How did that get in?’
    Alex was next for inspection. ‘Through your boots. See those eyelets?’
    Amber was rubbing her legs with antiseptic wipes, cleaning the scratches she’d got from the wait-a-while. She looked at her jungle boot hanging on its stick. The hole was tiny, barely bigger than the hole in a sheet of Filofax paper, but the glistening, pulsing thing Paulo had removed from Hex was like a fat sausage. She looked at Alex. ‘How?’
    ‘They’re like threads,’ explained Alex. ‘They swell up once they’ve had your blood. You also have to look out for little red crabs, like spiders. They bury their claws in your skin and feed on it. Some people get them more than others.’
    ‘Alex,’ said Paulo behind him, ‘did your dad say he got them a lot? You’re covered in them.’
    Amber put antiseptic cream on her legs. She’d got a bite too; probably a mosquito. You had to take extra care with any wounds in the jungle. The hot, humid conditions meant that infections spread like wildfire – and with her diabetes she had to be especially careful as cuts might not heal as quickly as normal. When she’d finished she waved the medical pack in the air. ‘Who’s next for wound treatment?’
    Li settled on her hammock with her boil-in-the-bag ration pack and dug her spoon in. It was something wet and meaty in a foil wrapper – not what she’d imagined as jungle fare – but it was hot and she was hungry. She shivered as the heat penetrated her hands. She hadn’t realized how cold it would be at night.
    They’d cleaned their wounds, put on insect repellent and were now in dry kit – a spare set of clothes they’d brought for eating and sleeping in so that they didn’t have to stay in the sweat-sodden ones they had worn all day. But the evening meal wasn’t a big comforting stew in a large pot around the fire. They couldn’t carry any large utensils, just a tiny personal gas stove each. Cooking consisted of boiling a mug of water and dunking a rations pack in it to warm – although later on they planned to catch local game and roast it, as they couldn’t carry enough rations packs for the whole trip. For now, though, the fire in the middle of the camp was for light, heat and to keep insects away.
    Hex swallowed a spoonful of food and grimaced. ‘What is this?’ He lifted the pack and looked at the label. ‘English beef stew,’ he read. ‘They must have searched every school kitchen in the land to come up with something as bad as this.’
    Alex dipped a spoon in but before he’d even brought it to his mouth he wrinkled his nose. He reached into his bergen, pulled out a tube of curry paste and squeezed a dollop in.
    Amber was watching him. ‘Dad’s advice?’
    Alex nodded, his mouth chewing.
    Amber looked down at her rations pack with distaste. ‘Have you got any of that stuff to spare?’
    Alex tossed the tube to her.
    She caught it one-handed, squeezed some in and took a mouthful. She swallowed and nodded enthusiastically. ‘Those SAS guys really are masters of survival. Anyone else?’
    For a while it was nice to concentrate on eating. Trekking through the jungle had been physically and mentally exhausting, and now the camp was made they were looking forward to sleeping. They hadn’t realized how dark it was getting until the dusk chorus started and the trees came alive with noise. Quails, hawks, toucans, parrots, guans, wrens, honeyleggers, motmots, iguanas, howler monkeys, spider monkeys, coatimundi, tapirs, peccaries, deer, ocelots and all sorts of insect – all of them called, chirped and howled as the sun slid down for the night.
    When they started eating, the camp was shadowy, with chinks of light visible through the canopy. As they